"@vdmeersven: Simple tutorial and quick start for cassandra - and easy to complete if you have Mac

Flexible schema : with Cassandra, like a document store, you don’t have to decide what fields you need in your records ahead of time. You can add and remove arbitrary fields on the fly. This is an incredible productivity boost, especially in large deployments. True scalability : Cassandra scales horizontally in the purest sense. To add more capacity to a cluster, turn on another machine. You don’t have restart any processes, change your application queries, or manually relocate any data. Multi-datacenter awareness : you can adjust your node layout to ensure that if one datacenter burns in a fire, an alternative datacenter will have at least one full copy of every record.